Design Inspiration: Four Beards. One Pencil. Roundup

Every so often, the hirsute creative team at 3 SIDED CUBE shares eight things that they are loving and have stimulated their designer minds. With four beards (don't worry, the growth of facial hair isn't a requirement for working here) and one pencil between them, they scour the web and our local community to show the sparks of creativity that inspire the projects they work on. Unlike the other Four Beards One Pencil blogs, this post is a compilation of our favourite thing from each volume so far!

This modern classic known for its battery life, ruggedness and most importantly – Snake – has been given a facelift by Nokia and was re-introduced to the market in 2017. As opposed to all other phones these days, its appeal lies in the lack of features: there’s no app store, only 16MB of storage (which you can upgrade with a microSD card – how old school) and its 2G connectivity limits you to calls and texts only. But it still comes with Snake so who cares?!

This awesome brand Little Planet Factory creates various size models of planets, moons, and suns. Globes can be as tiny as 10mm and can reach 200mm for those who want a more detailed surface. We think these are perfect for anyone’s desk when you’re busy procrastinating at work.

This is possibly the only time we wish Bournemouth were a little bit colder so that we could grab our boards and try this out along the seven miles of golden sand that are conveniently close to CUBE Towers.

Born in 1995 and reborn in 2017, WipEout was one of the first games to really champion graphic design, and released in its latest iteration this summer. The sci-fi aesthetic with neo-Tokyo typography, ship and team motif design were revolutionary at the time and we can’t wait to see how this has been pushed on the PS4 (the weapons and racing were pretty damn cool too).

The Nokia N-Gage and Donald Trump’s board game feature in this Swedish museum’s veneration of failed products. It’s designed to promote the idea that failure is inevitable, often humorous and a part of the design process not to be feared but embraced. Thinking about the team that thought a Colgate Frozen Lasagne range would be a good idea definitely makes us feel better when we don’t get it bang on…

A Fluent Design System exploration from Microsoft, using the Hololens technology: the future of user interfaces!

3D Slices of beautiful landscapes are referenced in Microsoft’s exploration of dimensionality in UI. As part of their Fluent design system, they have created some examples of how interactions could become more captivating and immersive – such as the weather app shown above. We hope to see these floating around our screens and hopefully in our home and workspaces at some point in the near future!